Selling Linux and Open Source to Bean Counters

Opinion: It's CFOs and dollars, not CIOs and gigabytes, that determine what technology companies buy. (Linux-Watch)

Im no bean-counter. Im an IT guy. But, I know that over the last few years, its CFOs and dollars, not CIOs and gigabytes, that determine what technology companies buy.
But, heres news you can use to get your CFO on board with a Linux and open-source makeover.
ETrade Financial saved $13 million a year and they realized a boost in performance by switching to Linux from Solaris.

Now, $13 million isnt chicken feed, even to a company like ETrade that reported $1.7 billion of revenue in 2005.

It wasnt just Linux that made the difference, though. It was also the Apache Web server and the Jakarta Tomcat JSP (Java Server Pages) servlet system.
In another eWEEK ETrade story, ETrades VP of architecture, Lee Thompson, said, "the Red Hat 7.2 kernel came out, which had support for SMP (symmetric multi-processing) and a 32-bit message queue for shared memory. And, all of a sudden, our application booted."
That, however, was only the first part of the story. Its what ETrade did next that many would-be corporate Linux supporters fail at.
Read the full story on Linux-Watch: Selling Linux and Open Source to bean countersCheck out eWEEK.coms for the latest open-source news, reviews and analysis.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is editor at large for Ziff Davis Enterprise. Prior to becoming a technology journalist, Vaughan-Nichols worked at NASA and the Department of Defense on numerous major technological projects. Since then, he's focused on covering the technology and business issues that make a real difference to the people in the industry.